The Man Without Qualities

We need some 'Greatest Short Books Of All Time' as an alternative for those without swathes of time and concentration.

Has anyone read the other Musil books? I tried reading "The Magic Mountain" by Thomas Mann recently as a follow up to this but I found it less witty and without story and verve to accompany the philosophy.

'The Confusions of Young Torless' is excellent, and only about 180 pages.

SHAMELESS SELF-PLUG: I used to write a great short books column for Bookslut - http://www.bookslut.com/authors.php?author=James%20Morrison - but gave up due to complete indifference from the editor.

I think I'm going to have to get 'The Confusions of Young Torless' as well, to read first, and hopefully ease the way towards 'The Man Without Qualities' (which I lugged home from work today and is mighty daunting).

I read "Young Torless" years ago, and loved it. The only Musil I've finished.

I think that getting outside "myself" (my tastes, etc), enough to really listen to stuff I'd never really heard before, while working in a record store, made me a better reviewer, a better "self" (one with bigger or better holes in it). I'll have to read that. Meanwhile, some other short greats or goods incl. "Ballad of the Sad Cafe" and Ethan Frome (oh yeah, and The Great Gatsby, The Crying of Lot 49, some by Faulkner)

OK, I'm ready to start this. I think. Encouragement, please!

i don't even want to think how long i've been reading this

Does dow post on ILM anymore? Really liked his posts...

Told myself I'd re-read this year AND MAKE NOTES ETC...I got hold of a short story collection of his last week.

Alfred read it now. There are fantastic holy shit moments on like every other page. I've still only read the first volume and desperately need to find the time to get to vol. 2, but i also want to read all of Dostoevsky's big works. Which to do first? It is a mystery.

read it alfred, took me about a year and a half but worth it...

What Aimless said.

reading it again now (after something like 14 years ).

awesome.

one of those rarset books where you can actually take smart quotes from and embrace them as a way of living.

Does anyone know how the different translations (vintage vs. picador) stack up? Is one supposed to be the "definitive" one? Both are available at used book stores, but I'm not sure which one to snag....

i don't know about definitive—i've never even seen the (older) picador one (kaiser and wilkins?)—but i've also only ever seen one dude in a comment box complain about the new translation (vintage, or knopf in hardcover) (pike and wilkins), and lots of people cheering it. and pike is great—i love reading the prose in his musil, and his recent version of rilke's novel was something.

the newer (vintage) contains a lot more of the nachlass / leftover stuff that musil never managed to incorporate into a finished whole. despite that the leftovers are quite worth reading if you like musil and the more finished parts.

The only criticism I've heard of the newer version is that the language is a bit too American in the slang, but that it's otherwise excellent

huh. i can't really recall there being much occasion for slang in the first place. musil ain't döblin.

I think the new version (on hardback only?) has an accompanying volume of Musil's sketches and for the remainder of the novel? Just sounds like an extra 200 pages of greatness really.

Cool, thanks for the tips I think I'll go with the new one then, I just liked the 3 different covers the picador editions used.

I have owned this for a couple of years now, and not even attempted to start it. Can someone convince me it has something to do with class and experimental literature? Then I can put it on my PhD reading list, otherwise it'll be another four years before I can even look at it.

class kinda, it's not a central preoccupation of the book tho, rly only concerning itself to any great extent with the upper class, upper middle class and the lumpenproletariat iirc

experimental lit not so much....it's extremely ambitious but not rly germane to its avant-garde contemporaries

you should read it anyway because it is very great

i am embarrassed to say i tried/failed to read this. are there any good articles/essays about it that are say somewhere between cliffs notes and the book itself?

not thinking there is a serious strain of experimentalism involved in musil's attempt to wed serious philosophical reflection with novelistic prose sounds rong rong rong to me. it even becomes one of the themes of the book. is there some standard of avant-gardism that his novelist contemporaries were setting that he wasn't (or wasn't trying to)? (i know i sound combative but this is a genuine question.)

philip, you might try reading 'precision and soul' or others of the essays in the collection by that name. if it's your way to work your way up or sidle into authors, you might also prefer to read one or more of the novellas in 'five women'.

I've read Mann, Proust, Powell...can't seem to get this thing going.

not thinking there is a serious strain of experimentalism involved in musil's attempt to wed serious philosophical reflection with novelistic prose sounds rong rong rong to me. it even becomes one of the themes of the book. is there some standard of avant-gardism that his novelist contemporaries were setting that he wasn't (or wasn't trying to)? (i know i sound combative but this is a genuine question.)

― j., Friday, 15 October 2010 23:30 (3 minutes ago)

don't think u understood...'experimental fiction' wd usually denote various formalist schools practised by 'avant-gardes', or specific techniques eg the versions of stream of consciousness found in late joyce or broch

i don't think musil was an avant-gardist in that sense

'serious philosophical reflection with novelistic prose' isn't a formal device as such, tho it is a strain that you could probably trace thru goethe, sartre, blanchot....

i'm saying that musil took the expression of thought to be intrinsically connected to the form the expression took, and that he took it to be a goal of the novelist to incorporate the intellectual content of his time. to attempt to do that in a novel calls for experimentation in form. the interest of various formalist avant-gardists in special literary devices just seems like a more conspicuous (sometimes because more narrowly focused) manifestation of that experimental attitude.

that's true, but i was responding to a question about its relevance to 'experimental literature', which i'd take to mean something more specific and formalist

my (british) edition, picador, just cuts off without editorial comment at the end of part three; german editions since the 50s and the new translation do not do this. so er i need to order the american edition before i can get around to finishing it, great.

j. how much of the book do you think reflects serious philosophical thought vs. mocking the pretensions of the characters' various attempts at same? (i kind of wonder if the original translation pushes things a little too far in the latter direction)

also how does the new one translate 'tausendjahrreich'?

tausendjahriges reich. whatever

i would have liked to quote from a chapter in volume 1 but i can only find volume 2. : (

here's burton pike, though, in the preface to the posthumous leftovers:

'musil did not finish the man without qualities, although he often said he intended to. there is no way of telling from either the parts published in his lifetime or his posthumous papers how he would have done so, or indeed whether he could have done so to his own satisfaction. this is because of the novel's rigorously experimental structure, consisting of an "open architecture" that could be developed in many directions from any given point. the novel does contain coherent individual threads and incidents, but musil firmly rejected the idea of a plotted narrative whole. therefore, while the drafts of the twenty chapters in part 1 of "from the posthumous papers" carry on from where "into the millennium" left off, the material in part 2 is not preliminary to a final version in the usual sense, but consists rather of notes, sketches, and drafts that musil was keeping in suspension for possible use in some form at some place in the ultimate text, a version he never decided upon and that must forever remain the object of tantalizing speculation.

…

the extent to which musil regarded this novel as experimental was extraordinary. he had begun work on it in earnest in 1924 and was most reluctant when the urging of publishers and worsening external conditions forced him to publish parts of it in 1931 and 1933 (pages 1-1130 in this edition [i.e. all of parts I, II, and III]). from his point of view, the entire text ought to have remained "open" from the beginning until it had all been written and he could then revise the text as a whole. he complained that partial publication removed those parts of the novel from the possibility of further alteration, as well as distorting the shape (again, a never defined, "open" shape) he had in mind for the whole work. as it was, in 1938, in less than robust health and apparently apprehensive that he would again be forced into premature publication, he withdrew the first twenty chapters that appear in "from the posthumous papers" when they were already set in galleys, in order to rework them still further. these chapters were not intended to conclude the novel but to continue "into the millennium". like goethe, musil had a strange sense of having infinite time stretching out before him in which to complete his task. one is tempted to see in his solitary and stubborn pursuit of his ideal more than a little of kafka's hunger artist.

musil's purpose in writing the man without qualities was a moral one. he had set out to explore possibilities for the right life in a culture that had lost both its center and its bearings but could not tear itself away from its outworn forms and habits of thought, even while they were dissolving. musil equated ethics and aesthetics, and was convinced that a union of "precision and soul," the language and discoveries of science with one's inner life of perceptions and feelings, could be, and must be, achieved. he meant this novel to be experienced as a moral lever to move the world, as emerson and nietzsche intended their writing to be experienced, in such a way that (in rilke's words) "you must change your life." musil's anguish becomes palpable as he pursues this search for the right life using the tools of scientific skepticism, while remaining all too aware of the apparently inherent limitations of human societies and, especially, of human nature. fortunately this anguish is leavened by a sparkling wit of language and situation, as when a character is described as wearing "a wig of split hairs."'

…

Cool, thanks for the tips I think I'll go with the new one then, I just liked the 3 different covers the picador editions used.

― Michael_Pemulis, Friday, 15 October 2010 18:18 (Yesterday) Permalink

Man oh man I love those covers. I have 2/3 vols then own the other vol in the picador (but not in the same style of cover?).

My feelings on this (to give ans emil.y) - Musil said he wasn't interested in Joyce. Given the few bits I know about Musil that could be jealousy but when you read the novel you can tell he wasn't.

He sorta explores the essay form in fiction. A bit like Proust or Borges except the former has more going on by the manner in which he wrote (e.g. the punctuation he utilizes).

Broch is in the middle of all that: part III of The Sleepwalkers is a worried essay but Death of Virgil builds on Joyce.

Interesting discussions about experimentalism, thanks guys. I may have to have a bit of a read of it just to see where I stand on the issue too.

i reread the first two chapters of part III (beginning of the second vintage volume) last night, the writing is really amazing.

compared to say 'the sleepwalkers' or 'the magic mountain', the way he depicts people thinking or talking about 'important things' makes broch and mann seem like old-timey allegorists. in the first chapter where he re-meets his sister, ulrich is depicted as feeling her out (he barely knows anything about her) in a conversation that takes all these turns in response to the content of what they've said (about her academic-climber of a husband and about gender relations, among other things) and to ulrich's read of her emotional reactions and of his own—it doesn't at all read like 'musil tries out some thoughts about education and gender', it's actually a scene in which people think, and it makes the situation and the people and the ideas seem bound together.

there are all sorts of inversions of time piled up in those first two chapters, it's crazy. but the most awesome is his father's telegram:

this is to inform you that i am deceased.

– your father

j you're right in that an idea and a character are more fused together in Musil. Mann (at least in the read I gave to The Magic Mountain) in comparison is quite wooden, all symbols playing off against one anther for supremacy instead of beings on the page, thinking and feeling. I largely think this to be the case in much of the Sleepwalkers (each of the three main characters representing an age blah) but in part III he's playing at a few different things in the essays.

Actually got a copy of part III on its own and I'll need to give that a re-read sometime.

i would agree about mann except that i do think a lot of the stiffness in 'magic mountain' is not unintentional. it seemed to me like a writerly way to solve the problem of how to depict attraction to and enticement by competing 'great ideas' and their corresponding ways of life, without the course of a novel being the most apt place to express such things. (i put it that way, mainly because i'm trying not to say 'mann didn't understand these things well enough to do them justice in fictional form'.) things in that novel seem quite affected by the naive hans, spiritual education in progress, being the focal point of the narrative, even if the official narrator is distinct from hans.

the "essays" in Man Without Qualities are (with or without context to the actual "prose" of the book) some of the best, most pure philosophical material ever written (in style and in contents) and Musil insights are magnificent and inspiring.

i finally read "the confusions of young torless", it was great. i found it tougher going than mwq but still full of really brilliant insight. also i'd forgotten, beyond the philosophy even, what a brilliant mood musil can conjure. torless is so relentlessly violent and bleak, even the thoughts and feelings seem to have a real sense of blood and thunder to them.

i also bought flypaper, a collection of short stories, but not started it yet.

Been finishng his diaries - a lot more relaxed than his novels. Diaries that were not intended for publication will always do that on one level, but its even more pronounced in this case.

Took a while for it to warm up to the contents, so this got more interesting with the entries composed while he was engaged with MwQ, and its reaction: namely his frustration at lack of reaction and non-recognition in Austria. He did save most of his energies for the novel but there are some gems: when he describes H!tler as an emotion, then you see his scientific background on the one hand, and openess to mysticism on the other. A good moment is when he reflects on MwQ that has been pusblished so far as having too much essayistic material that doesn't stick (or words to that effect). The introduction is worth a good scan.

Just finished today and there is a wonderful set of entries, a kind of notes-to-an-autobiography that (like so many of his ideas for novels, etc) never materialized.

Really a must (even when there is planty to quibble over and get frustrated by), just an opportunity to spend more time in his company.

Also: http://www.richardnagy.com/current/

Egon Schiele exhibition (whose paintings were reproduced on those MwQ Picador covers)

Young Torless frightened me when I read it in college in '95 -- one of the first times a work of lit forced me to rethink my sexuality.

it really is quite intense alright.

thanks for that info julio, i have had diaries in my amazon basket for a long time, must buy them then. also will check that exhibition...

No probs Ronan.

All I need to read now is that volume that ceme with the Burton Pike translation of sketches/scenes/proposed endings fo MwQ (only available w/the hardback I think)

no, not in the current u.s. paperback ed—it's all crammed into the second volume.

anyone else read flypaper? don't know why i held off on reading more than the title essay till now, it's such perfect musil material. "it's lovely here" and "monuments" in particular are really good. when he's in the mood to make a point it's always so nicely weighted, never browbeating. and he has that 1 per cent smartass quality running through things too.

I had completely forgotten that I was the one who recommended this formative book to LG. What a feather in my cap! To be honest, I am now incapable about thinking of this book or Musil without thinking of LG, and vice versa.

:) i owe you greatly. it's still such a big thing for me, that book. i have considered musil related tattoos.

you should totally research the system (of notation? symbols?) he used to organize his notebooks for 'man'.

Ha, LG, I refuse to take responsibility for any Musil-related body ink. Whenever I see reference to this book (granted probably most often on this board) I think to myself, LG got so much more out of it than I did, I should read it again. And then I see a shiny thing in the distance and forget all about it until the next time it comes up.

Cheers! loving it so far. Not sure what I expected, but this is quite surprising and contemporary and entertaining so far. Just read up to how Ulrich surprises himself by asking for clemency for the sex murderer.

I've been meaning to start this for a while: I've had the book for ages, but couldn't work out if it was complete or not, and had to lots of googling to get a look at various contents pages of various editions online.

My copy is the UK "one-volume" edition of the Wilkins/pike translation, which stops abruptly on p1130 without any explanation, leaving out all the posthumous/unpublished stuff, so I've had to order volume 2 of the US edition to get all that as well. Seems as though the publisher, Picador, could have included a page or two of explanation, instead of these stupid ads at the end for kent Haruf books I don''t want to read.

In the unlikely event the vol 2 doesn't arrived before I get up to that point, I will be making use of http://gen.lib.rus.ec/search.php?req=musil+qualities+knopf&open=0&view=simple&phrase=1&column=def

My memories of bleak, scary Young Torless did not lead me to expect this to be as humourous as it is (this is not a complaint)

Link to that BBC episode xyzzzz mentioned ~2yrs ago, with download http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02twpys

Will listen to when have finished book. Forgive me for using this thread as a sort of notebook.

Shit my Dad says, Musil edition:

"Oh, I tried to read that once. Didn't get very far. I called it 'The Book Without Qualities'."

:(

This book is amazing. I see what everyone means about it taking over your thoughts: even when I'm not reading it, I'm stewing on it.

Just finished the extraordinary scene where they're watching the flasher lurking in the garden.

The transition from the end of the claustrophobic vol 2, to the weirdly sunny funeral-time with Ulrich and his sister, was great. Love the vibe between the siblings, though I have a horrible feeling about where it's going.

The only criticism I've heard of the newer version is that the language is a bit too American in the slang, but that it's otherwise excellent

― buildings with goats on the roof (James Morrison), Friday, October 15, 2010 3:03 PM (5 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

No idea what i was talking about here

Annoyingly, despite my having bought this book new, it has some nitwit's pencil scribblings every 100 pages or so, inexpertly rubbed out (taking some of the type with it): someone must have returned this copy to a bookshop after defacing it, it got returned to the publisher, and then sent to me, and because it took me 7 years to get round to reading it, it's a bit late to complain and ask for a new copy.

James Morrison for President of ILB

My memories of bleak, scary Young Torless did not lead me to expect this to be as humourous as it is (this is not a complaint)

yeah torless is so claustrophobic and brooding with violence - man without qualities is indeed really funny and often quite plainly acerbic or dry. i can see that some parts are a slog, like a few chapters at a time here and there, but it still surprises me that some people give up on it or find it a waste of time.

This book is amazing. I see what everyone means about it taking over your thoughts: even when I'm not reading it, I'm stewing on it.

this thread is probably full of me commenting to this effect but that's really how it was when i read it. i can remember reading it on public transport and being struck by some amazing insight or other, and feeling like i wanted to share it with someone as soon as i could. i worked in a bookshop when i read it and occasionally i'd end up chatting to someone who bought a thomas mann book or something vaguely similar, and be like "have you read the man without qualities" - usually if they had it was like this cult revelation.

must read it again sometime, i'd really like to have bookmarked all my favourite parts.

The blurb on the back says something along the lines of every page has some observation or description which strikes you anew, and while most blurbs are balls, this one is really true. Not bad when every page = 1100+ pages

it's so wide-ranging as well - like it's casually brilliant on so many different topics. i'd need to read it again to remember it all as it was about 2008 when i finished it, but the general stumpf chapters in particular are incredible, especially for the internet age.

love the poor old general and his aborted scheme to read all the important books, one per day

Have finished the main book, and the bonus stuff not yet arrived in post, so will have to wait a bit to read on. It's odd the way it actually seems to be building to a climax at the end, with the weight of all the read pages in your left hand and almost all the characters assembling in one place, but then it doesn't, of course. Hard to know how it ever could have an ending. I read that Musil told someone he wanted the book the end suddenly, midsentence, with a comma, and it actually almost does.

Most vivid characters at the moment as i think back on it are the general, the surprisingly sane and balanced agnes, despite her criminality, and the strange, somewhat mad clarisse, idling along and clutching at people like a deluded, messianic crab.

in a letter of 1934 to his friend the satirist Franz Blei, Musil, given his desperate personal situation and the Nazi takeover in Germany, compares his continued work on The Man without Qualities to “the diligence of a woodworm, boring through a picture frame in a house that is already ablaze”.

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/reviews/biography/article729270.ece. (Paywalled)

Awesome how you finished this so fast! What's the Bonus stuff? Can you buy that as a separate vol?

Ronan - did you read Thought Flights?

The bonus stuff is all in the second volume of the Pike/Burton translation, http://www.amazon.com/Man-Without-Qualities-Vol-Millennium/dp/0679768025

It's 20 chapters/200 pages Musil removed from the published book at the last minute, plus about 400 pages of unfinished extra chapters, scenes, notes, etc

If one were inclined to "preview" it, one could do so at http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=64d2da654c43c543a06c53ac513a3902

i really want to reread this now. hm

i mean i feel like that desire would last ~ 100 pages but

Ha, know the feeling

I started this again. Wish me luck.

Luck!

ch wünsche dir viel Glück dabei.

Ach.
Ich wünsche dir viel Glück dabei.

(I would have just typed instead of c+p, but easier to get the umlauts the other way)

I keep meaning to retry this. I got about halfway last time. I remember I was enjoying it - think I must have got distracted by something else.

Ronan - did you read Thought Flights?

just saw this question from upthread. i have it but haven't read it yet. maybe read a few pages. need to remedy.

'The Confusions of Young Torless' is excellent, and only about 180 pages.

SHAMELESS SELF-PLUG: I used to write a great short books column for Bookslut - http://www.bookslut.com/authors.php?author=James%20Morrison - but gave up due to complete indifference from the editor.

― James Morrison, Sunday, November 9, 2008 4:48 PM (7 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sick. im gonna read all of these i love short books

First impressions after roughly 100pp. The approach to story or content is extremely diffuse. The best description of the story so far might be 'some things happen'. But this diffusion is more than offset by the crisp acuity and rueful humor of the author's voice. I am carried along happily wherever Musil wishes to take me, trusting implicitly that he will take me to a place of interest, sentence by sentence.

incidentally, Musil's prose, as viewed through the lens of the translation, is purely remarkable without being striking. He doesn't form his phrases to impress you through stylistic posturing. Instead they each carry an intellectual tension that he successfully resolves over and over again, either as wit or as insight. It's pretty cool to watch him work.

Nicely put, aimless. Diffuse is the word---in 1000 pages the plot will not be much further advanced, but there is something great or lgely on each of those pages

What translation, Aimless? Anybody?

I have the Sophie Wilkins & Burton Pike translation.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/03/26/robert-musil-infinities-man-without-qualities/

This review has Hofmann saying a bunch of really nice things about Musil but its really unbalanced as a critique of translation in the sense that I have no idea why the NYRB edition is a good translation in the same way that the Archipelago edition of the Novellas is terrible. The review of the NYRB is simply puff.

Finally made up my mind to get the 2-vol, but on the way, I ran into an ad for Agathe, published in Dec. 2019. Should I get this too? Read it first?

Maybe I should wait for *all* the related material? Brian Wilson, Arthur Russell, Bolano, aieeee

Agathe is basically a carefully edited extract. Get the full thing and read it first.

Thanks. Had to call the plumber, so yet another sign that I should read all the books I have before ordering more.